Product Description
For freshman/sophomore-level courses in any Music Theory curriculum. Blending step-by-step guidance with frequent practice, this text helps students cultivate an understanding of sight singing. This text presents melodies and exercises that enable students to develop the skills of reading pitch, reading rhythm, and combining these two essential elements. The Sixth Edition contains nearly 1200 melodies taken from a wide spectrum of music literature and the world's folk music.
From the Back Cover
The study of sight singing is one of the most important means of developing the ability to recognize ("to hear") mentally the sound of music notation on the printed page without the necessity of recourse to a musical instrument. For the professional musician, performer, or teacher, this skill is a necessity, while for others, achievement will greatly amplify the pleasures of musical activity in performance and listening.
To achieve success in sight singing, students must have large numbers of melodies available for practice. Once a melody has been sung, repetition is no longer "singing at first sight," although reviewing for study purposes is highly recommended. To this end, this volume includes 1,199 examples. Most of these are chosen from worldwide folk sources and a wide variety of composed music, ranging from melodies simpler than Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star to excerpts from Bartok string quartets. The remaining examples, written by the author, provide practice for rhythm alone, and for singing melodies composed only of adjacent scale steps, valuable for initial study but rarely found in music literature.
Each chapter presents only one new problem, either in rhythm or in melody, allowing students to concentrate on the newly introduced feature. Otherwise, no chapter will include any material not already presented in earlier chapters. For the dedicated student, this careful selection and grading of melodies guarantees steady and rewarding progress to a successful accomplishment of sight singing skills. Some of the changes in the new edition include:
- Additional melodies incorporating modulation and other uses of chromaticism.
- In many chapters, order of materials reorganized to reflect a better sequence from easy to more difficult.
- Revised and/or added materials in introductory statements, especially in the subjects of the hemiola, melodic use of the Neapolitan sixth harmony, and twentieth-century music.
- Numerous new melodies, including a "find" of easy but effective melodies by Schubert, especially in modulation and syncopation.
by Dorothy Payne
by Michael Horvit
by Robert W. Ottman
by Anne C. Hall
by Jane Piper Clendinning
